Productive Morning
July 15th, 2006 | by Loretta |Get it? Productive? Produce? To produce?
Saturday morning entailed going out with mom, as usual. And when we got back in the mid-morning, we unpacked the groceries we had bought and prepared an early lunch for the family. She went to go do laundry and I took care of washing produce.
All of it.
Typically, I wash them by drowning the fruits in a basin of clean tap water. We don’t use Fit or other produce cleanser products. Have you read about those? It takes more effort to remove the cleanser than it does to clean the produce straight up with regular water.
I do have a secret though, as passed down from my grandmother through my mom: we add some salt to the water. It helps in a few ways. It can create a slight abrasion to scrub the fruits a little. Also, not all bacteria are halophiles. And I’m convinced salinity can help break down some of the waxy coatings.
Peaches today reminded me of elementary school: each of them had a sticker for being wonderful. Consider this: peeling the sticker off at the beginning (it gets loosened after submerging in water for a bit) will mean the area that was once covered by the sticker will be cleaned.
We grow a lot of stuff in our small backyard. Among the many different veggies and fruits, we have cucumbers! And dad said we had a lot (we didn’t bother to look for any when he was away the last ~20 days.) So I cut one up for mom, who wanted a snack.
“MOM! Do I have to pluck allllll of these from the stems?”
Mom goes, “They’ll come off by themselves if you wash them enough.
So I think, ok, I just gotta swish, dip and redip these in water a lot. And run my fingers through the stems. Eventualy, and I really mean eventually, it worked out.
Ta-da! The good news: they’re squeaky clean.
The bad news? They’re prone to infection without their stems (fresh wounds! oh no!) so they should be eaten by the end of today or else they’ll go bad. 